There are six dimensions of the ethical problems that circulate IS in our everyday lives which include employment, health, privacy, crime, working conditions, and individuality. However, overcoming ethical issues in the work environment requires IS to detect computer or cybercrime through various security management tools and technologies that detect unauthorized use or unauthorized access or modification to network resources, hacking, cyber theft, or any unauthorized software copying.
We can use ‘computer monitoring’ for detecting internet abuses in the workplace that highlights the first element in overcoming the ethical problem of the intellectual framework that we use to make sense of the IS. ‘Computer monitoring’ in terms of the technology enables as the best method to assess the potential benefits or drawbacks of those strategies that are adopted by the company’s infrastructure for safeguarding geospatial information that requires an understanding of how a potential enemy could use the protected data.
However, it is not sufficient that assessment of such data could be used for malicious purposes, since this determination neglects whether there are alternative sources to access comparable information and substantially fulfill the attacker’s needs as well as the possible benefits of such information.
Using and Abusing Information
Besides the moral ethics of the workplace, the growing trend of the increasing prevalence of computer-mediated communication in the workplace has focused the minds of employers on the use of organizational equipment for non-organizational tasks. This of course is not a new phenomenon which enables critics to provoke the lines between working and personal life to be found and is much more than what it calls unethical to use work stationery for personal tasks, the use of private telephones for ‘work’ calls, the use of work telephones for ‘private’ calls and the reading of newspapers in work time.
Issues that highlight the use and abuse of information are particularly relevant in office environments and occupations, such as factory production line work and call center operators, are indeed more strictly controlled and delineated in the timing of their activities. There are no clear lines to be drawn in any of these cases where the prevalence of widely available internet tools and technologies create awareness even in the sectors where they were not deemed to broaden the spectrum of possibilities by offering a powerful tool of information access and distribution to many employees.
Relationship between use and abuse
The most difficult area to distinguish in the ethical issues of cyber threat is the intersection between use and abuse, the area where personal use may have some positive workplace implications, and work use may benefit the individual personally. Internet surfing where on one hand is used for hobby interests, on the other is considered as the prerequisite skill for employees who use those same skills for work tasks. Similarly, problem-solving issues in the context of colleagues or friends may reduce cost, time, and resources in-house, whether they are through the resolving of technology queries or personal counseling. Critics believe that this ability to resolve personal issues during work time environment for example employees resolving issues such as the renewal of car insurance over the Internet allows them to concentrate on work tasks.
‘Dual use’ is also preferred in some working environments where it is natural, even desirable, that employees become friendly with colleagues, either through combining social and work discussions within e-mails or through online discussions or live chats. Individuals do not leave their personal lives at home entirely, and employers should not expect them to do so employers might keep in mind that employees will often take work home with them, either literally or mentally. It seems a fair reciprocal exchange to be tolerant of home life making an appearance in the workplace. Accepting employees as whole human beings, with all the benefits and some of the drawbacks this may bring, is likely to be beneficial to all in the longer term.
Reason for choosing or not choosing Computer Monitoring
For many organizations, computer monitoring programs are not considered ethical for they exploit employee privacy and confidentiality with other team members, however traditionally the program that records and monitors primary impetus for information seeking in organizations has remained successful in maintaining an ethical environment for work. The reason is not that such programs only help to alleviate unethical measures at work, such programs also are effective in maintaining and recording the productivity and behavior of the employees. In an organization, IS can be conceived of as a system for supporting the decision-making process and the critical issue for organizations is that well-formed decisions be made.
To monitor computers or not is not the concern, the issue is to maintain an ethical professional working environment which is critical to decision making and the associated process of uncertainty reduction, it is a secondary subservient process, done to support these larger objectives. As a result, information-seeking research in these areas is often an afterthought, subsidiary to larger themes, although some have suggested processes related to attention and search are the most relevant to how decisions are actually made.